The Challenge of James

I'm working on my final paper for my New Testament class, and one of the resources for my paper included a section that I found challenging and inspiring. I have quoted a section of it below:

"...Among James's readers, as well, there were clearly some who considered that believing 'that God is one' (Jas 2:19) qualified them to be considered among God's people, or that believing in 'our glorious Lord Jesus Christ' (2:1) was itself sufficient to consider themselves members of the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus. The propensity to find a refuge in religion and a resting place within a community of faith remains constant and keeps James's exhortation perennially relevant.

The tendency can take the form of compulsive doctrinal correctness or ritual conformity. The mark of a 'good' Christian can become the fervent affirmation of the right confessional formulae or a pledge of allegiance to the inspiration of Scripture or an insistence on the inerrancy of a leader or the dedication to the proper liturgical forms. It can also take the form of an obsessive use of religious language, as though faith were a matter of a style of speech, and that devotion to a person could best be demonstrated by the number of times his name was mentioned. The mark of a 'good' Christian can become the constant invocation of the Lord in every conversation."

More to come...this is all I have time to type at the moment...

From: Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Letter of James. The New Interpreter's Bible XII: A Commentary in 12 Volumes. Abingdon Press, Nashville: 1998.